Hot Sauce Business is Now Booming After Giving Away $8,000 in Free Samples Online

One month ago, Hot Squeeze was struggling. The small hot sauce business was nearing insolvency as its owner, former caterer Sue Sullivan, was in the middle of a divorce—”two things I don’t recommend doing at the same time,” she shares in a Reddit post.

But when a friend offered Sullivan the chance to share a booth at the NYC Fancy Food Show, she had an opportunity to get national exposure for Hot Squeeze.

“It’s the biggest trade show in the food industry—as in globally,” she explains in her post. “Companies put down small fortunes and hire women in little outfits to woo customers … I, on the other hand, had something like $23,000 from my savings account and…uh, T-shirts.”

Sullivan’s booth at Fancy Food. (Reddit user thehotsqueeze)

On the surface, Sullivan’s appearance was a success. After the event, she closed national distribution deals for Hot Squeeze. “[M]ore buyers than I could handle,” she writes.

But after months of demos, festivals, and “living in a world of cardboard,” the entrepreneur was still struggling financially, as most of the profits went to her distributors.

“[T]he food industry is no fairy-tale world,” she warns. “I would sell $12,000 worth of product and get back something like $500 … Soon, I was bleeding so much financially that I had to scale back almost to where I started.”

After struggling for eight years to keep her business afloat, Sullivan considered shutting it down.

But then she received a call from Kroger, the second-largest supermarket chain in the US, offering to review Hot Squeeze. If they liked it, they would buy it directly from Sullivan—cutting out the distributor middle-men and allowing her to make her business truly successful.

“I need to give Kroger a compelling reason to take up Hot Squeeze,” she wrote, “and I’m starting by giving you guys a choice of a free sample … to spread the word.”

Redditors from across the US participated in the hot sauce giveaway, which Sullivan funded through $8,111 in Kickstarter donations from current customers.

Reddit user thehotsqueeze

Sullivan hoped that redditors who tried the sauce would complete a survey to rate her product. But she was surprised when they took their enthusiasm one step further.

“[C]alls and e-mails were flooding into Kroger from all over the country asking for my product,” Sullivan recalls.

When the day of the meeting arrived, she received a “handshake deal” from the retailer, followed soon after by another offer from Stop and Shop—all thanks to a wave of calls and emails from what the grocery stores described as “people from the Internet.”